Happy Friday everyone and for the third series post in a row I have a mystery series for you. After current (at the time it was written) with Imogen Quy last week and St Just before that this week (coincidentally both set in Cambridge) this week it’s a historical mystery series – not set in Cambridge!
These are called the Spector Locked Room mysteries, but I think it’s fair to say that Joseph Spector and the police detective who calls him in George Flint are equal leads in these locked room mystery stories. And every mystery may not be a literal locked room (although several are!) but they are so called ‘”impossible” crimes where it appears impossible for the deaths to have been carried out by a human or be anything other than suicides.
Now there are a fair few locked room mysteries in Agatha Christie (Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Mysterious Affair at Styles) but I would say that these are closer to John Dickson Carr’s books. Tom Mead has come up incredibly twisty solutions, that often require a fair degree of concentration to follow as they’re explained, which is not something I’ve ever found with Christie.
These are set in the 1930s – we’ve reached 1939 in this latest one – which firmly puts them in that inter-war Golden Age-esque category of historical mysteries. The other series that has a magician and a policeman working together is Elly Griffiths’ Brighton Mysteries – but those are all post world war two, and tend to be more focussed on Edgar (the policeman) not Max (the magician). The first book in this series, Death and the Conjuror was a BotW in July last year, but I think the fourth book in the series is the best/my favourite – it’s got a creepy mansion that can get cut off by the tide that attracts ghost hunters and people seeking contact with the spirit world.
The first three of these have been consistently in Kindle Unlimited since I started reading them last year, but the fourth one isn’t yet – I was wondering if it would go in when it came out in paperback but it didn’t – although I did pick it up when it was on sale. No news yet on whether there is a book five, but there are a couple of short story collections too that I haven’t had a chance to read yet.
Have a great weekend.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 